Thursday, 30 June 2011

A reply from Ms Sue Evans!

Thank you for your email and please do feel free to call me Sue. I hope you don’t mind me calling you Dominic.

As Mark said in his reply, the performance of the line between Oxford and London Paddington is nowhere near where it should be.

While the responsibility for much of this lies with Network Rail, accountability to our customers most definitely lies with us, and when things do go wrong we do everything in our power to make up time.

It is disappointing that despite every effort to do so today your train still arrived two minutes late. We understand how irritating this can be.

Our aim is for every train to arrive on time, every time. It is a challenge and is not easy. We are making progress, and last week delays caused by train failures were the lowest since the beginning of the current franchise in 2006. The week was not however one of good performance, and there have been far too many infrastructure problems, especially with signal and points failures.

We are working with Network Rail to help them do better at this. I know you don’t want platitudes or excuses. I know you want your train to depart and arrive at the times we say it will. This is what we want too and I am sorry it has not been your recent experience.

Do keep in touch. Mark and I will not always be able to reply personally, but we will make sure you get a full reply. Our focus remains on driving down delays, especially on the Oxford route.

Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time

"War and Peace on the Oxford to London line"

Dramatis personae

Mark Hopwood - Managing Director of First Great Western trains

Sue Evans - Director of Communications for First Great Western trains

Dominic - that's me. I'm unhappy with Mark and Sue.

About me

My name is Dominic. For two years I commuted between Oxford and London on First Great Western trains. In late June 2011, after 14 months of paying around £450 a month for utterly appalling service, I decided to speak up.

Every time my train was delayed, I wrote to the Managing Director and Director of Communications for FGW trains - and the length of my email reflected the length of that day's delay... the idea being that I would waste the same amount of their time as they had wasted mine.

I kept it up for nine months - during which time I wrote around 100,000 words in 97 letters, reflecting over 24 hours of delays to my commute.

What follows are those letters - and their replies. Nothing is edited.

(Also: thanks to all who have contacted me to say how much they've sympathised, empathised or enjoyed these letters. It means a lot, honestly.)